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Recent studies indicate that video game or chat addictions aren’t the only dangers posed to children by computers. According to an article by Jennifer Thomas of Health Day, over 9,000 children are now injured every year by computer hardware—a dramatic increase from the 1,300 kids hurt by computers in 1994.

The majority of children are under the age of five, and most of their injuries resulted from tripping over computer chords or toppling monitors and other large computer components. While many of the injuries are not very serious—and their prevalence has decreased from a peak of 10,000 injuries a few years ago thanks to flat screens and other lighter technology—some youngsters have suffered damage to their heads.
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Community

Searching through wreckage in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina might not sound like much fun, but it’s these kinds of scenarios that Ace—a yellow Labrador trained by the National Search Dog Foundation (SDF)—lives for. In 2005, he and his then-handler, Teresa Ortenberger of California Task Force 7, went to New Orleans, scouring the city grounds for survivors and ensuring areas were clear before reconstruction teams began work.
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Community

1. Pyrrhic victory

After a rare home win by the Washington Nationals, celebrations were canceled at the ballpark in Washington D.C. when post-victory fireworks debris fell on fans including a metro-area fire chief. Displays resumed because authorities predict threat of future Nationals’ wins not great enough to pose future fireworks danger.

Lesson: Make sure fireworks land in safe place; consult relevant laws or authorities to make sure what you’re doing is legal

Community

I started indoor rock climbing last spring. I’m not a particularly gifted athlete, but I’ve taken a liking to the way the sport encourages you to work at your own pace. It’s a rewarding activity for those who aren’t afraid to conquer their fear of heights.

What Is It?

Indoor climbing imitates the experience of climbing outdoors in a safe, controlled environment. It’s a sport that’s great for all ages; I’ve seen kids as young as six and adults in their sixties at the climbing gym. It develops physical strength, balance, hand-eye coordination, and burns a lot of calories. The sport is also mentally stimulating, promoting constant awareness, assessing challenges and consequences, and quick thinking.
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Community

Make something a priority and you’ll find time to make it happen, Gill said.

Saying Linda Gill was born to run might be an exaggeration, but since her teens she has trained for and competed in races. Her freshman year in high school a PE teacher noticed Gill’s ability during a fitness class and singed her up for the track team; her sophomore year a coach grabbed Gill from the swimming pool to conscript her for women’s cross country. She honed her natural talent, winning at the state level for high school, the national collegiate level as a student at UCLA, and now continues to compete.
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CEO

Chris is the cofounder and CEO of Life360. Before doing the whole startup thing, he did a stint in banking at Goldman Sachs and spent a few years in the Air Force. He went to college at UC Berkeley, and was about to start class at Harvard Business School when he had a last minute change of heart and decided to pioneer the trend of being an ivy league pre-dropout. In his time off, Chris likes to do anything that involves machines that move--like building drones, driving cars, flying planes, and piloting hovercraft. He is also widely credited with coining the term App Store Optimization.

As part of our core strategy at Life360, we are building a developer API that will allow third-party developers to create their own widgets (web-based components based on HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) on our platform. Included in this strategy is a web console which allows users to view and arrange the various widgets they want to use. Instead of reinventing the wheel, we went out in search of a project that could help us fulfill our goal. Enter the Shindig project, an open source Apache incubator project that allows us to serve our widgets.

Unfortunately, the Shindig project does not come with the ability to drag-and-drop the widgets. To add this functionality, one of our core developers, Matt Russell, created an extension to Shindig called Shindig-dnd. Shindig-dnd adds several capabilities on top of Shindig to provide drag-and-drop functionality similar to something like iGoogle. Since we are such huge proponents of open source software, we have decided to release this code to the world and hope that other people can find cool and interesting things to do with it.

Screencasts

Demo showing off the main capabilities of Shindig-dnd:

Quick tutorial to get Shindig-dnd installed and running:

More Info

We hope you enjoyed the screencasts. If you would like to download the code you can get it at Google Code. The code has been tested on FF3, Safari3, and IE7, but please let us know if you have any issues with it. For a more technical discussion behind this project, please check out Matt Russell’s blog. And, if you have any other questions or would like to find out more about our developer API, feel free to email me at alex AT life360 DOT com. We hope you appreciate this code; we would appreciate it if you could rate some of our widgets and come up with you own ideas of apps to build on our platform over at Life360.

CEO

Chris is the cofounder and CEO of Life360. Before doing the whole startup thing, he did a stint in banking at Goldman Sachs and spent a few years in the Air Force. He went to college at UC Berkeley, and was about to start class at Harvard Business School when he had a last minute change of heart and decided to pioneer the trend of being an ivy league pre-dropout. In his time off, Chris likes to do anything that involves machines that move--like building drones, driving cars, flying planes, and piloting hovercraft. He is also widely credited with coining the term App Store Optimization.

Welcome to the first blog post from Life360; it was our intent to use this space to talk about the company, but instead let me tell you about our last 24 hours. We were a Top 50 winner in Google’s Android Developer Challenge, and were expecting the final round results sometime next week, when last night, we got a call giving us the excellent news that we were picked as one of the first place teams!

You can’t imagine how excited we were—but then the reality quickly turned to panic when we realized that meant we needed to build a homepage within 24 hours. After a quick celebratory drink at Bear’s Lair in Berkeley, we started bracing for a hectic day, and here is the result! If you look around you’ll see a few holes here and there (please excuse us), but to the dev and design team, thanks for coming through in a pinch, and for everyone else, please check back frequently over the next few days as we add content.

If you are reading this, you are probably interested in our Android application. We’ll try to post some more comprehensive screenshots later tonight or tomorrow and perhaps a video next week. I’m also very excited to do our “real” company introduction, because Android and mobile is only one piece of what we are about—so stay tuned!

We also are very curious to hear what you think. If you post a comment or shoot us an email I promise to get back to you.